Technology | AI
Dell Adds 1,000 Clients for AI Servers, Targets Corporate Users
By Dina Bass
May 18, 2026
Michael Dell Photographer: Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg
Dell Technologies Inc. said it added 1,000 customers for a key AI product line in the past quarter as the company tries to capture business from traditional large businesses taking on new artificial intelligence workloads.
Dell now has 5,000 clients for its AI Factory, a line of servers to power artificial intelligence work with Nvidia Corp. chips, software and services, up from 4,000 when the company reported quarterly earnings in February, Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell said in an interview. Customers including Eli Lilly & Co., Honeywell International Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. are using Dell products for work such as drug discovery and creating AI-optimized semiconductor factories.
The hardware company, which has long sold traditional servers and storage to most of the biggest US companies, is trying to take advantage of a shift by these clients to use their own equipment to deploy AI, an area that has been dominated by cloud providers and AI-focused firms.
“We have been winning disproportionately in this area,” Michael Dell said. “In the enterprise, nothing is taken for granted, but we have done a great job for customers in their existing infrastructure and so they’re giving us the opportunity with AI to help them with that.”
Traditional enterprises have different challenges in standing up AI applications, including in some cases decades of data sitting in older systems, he said.
“They also see these new AI-native companies — they’re moving at a completely different speed — and so they want to be like that, right?” Dell said. “And they just take AI and bolt it on to their existing business and systems. That’s not really going to work.”
Dell is unveiling new products to aid businesses in setting up things like AI agents in ways that cost less and work with in-house company networks. A new product called Dell Deskside Agentic AI runs on a client’s Dell machines using Nvidia software, rather than in the cloud. Dell is also partnering with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Palantir Technologies Inc. and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to bring those companies’ AI models and tools to in-house corporate networks, or in some cases combinations of cloud and in-house.
Dell is announcing the new products and talking about customers Monday at its Dell Technologies World conference in Las Vegas.
French artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI is also expected to announce it’s expanding its work with Dell to use servers with Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs, to develop and distribute Mistral’s AI models.
“AI is clearly a transformative technology, and this is a kind of an existential moment for companies and for the world,” Michael Dell said.
In the short term, however, companies also need to think about protecting their systems from attackers as AI makes it easier for hackers in the short-term, he said.
“If the AI can be fantastic at coding, it can also be fantastic at malicious intent with code, unfortunately, and so, there’s a short-term activity where there’s a ton of hardening going on across critical systems,” he said. In the end, AI “should help us be more secure. But there could be a bit of a rocky period here and so we all need to harden our systems.”
Excerpted from Bloomberg.com, May 18, 2026, copyright by Bloomberg L.P. with all rights reserved.
This reprint implies no endorsement, either tacit or expressed, of any company, product, service or investment opportunity.
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